The focus of this thesis is how women’s experiences during the Holocaust, particularly experiences concerning sexualized and gendered violence, are mostly excluded from the public-facing American understanding and narrative of the Holocaust. This collective narrative has formed through individual and collective memory, immigration, politics, popular media, academic scholarship, and museums, and is reinforced in public education. Although scholarship has examined sexualized violence and gendered experiences perpetrated by the Nazis and others during the Holocaust, U.S. public educational institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) have not yet caught up in terms of inclusive exhibition. My main intervention is discussing the disconnect between scholarship and museum content through examining the USHMM’s materials on women’s experiences during the Holocaust and critiquing their online exhibitions, as well as offering possible solutions to make a more inclusive and correct narrative. One of these solutions is my supplementary online exhibition plan about women’s medical experiences in the concentration camps. I also intervene in the museum’s materials on women by discussing the experiences of German lesbians and masculine-presenting women during World War II. I intervene in the USHMM’s materials about women in order to strengthen public education and encourage accuracy and inclusivity in the American collective narrative of the Holocaust.

This dissertation explores the creation of "America's Arabia" in the Coachella Valley, California and the date industry that grew there. Importantly, it profiles United States Department of Agriculture agricultural explorers, scientists who traveled the globe looking for new crops at the turn of the twentieth century. When these agricultural explorers ventured to the Greater Middle East to bring back date offshoots, they took with them a popular understanding of the Orient that shaped their views of the date palms and the people who grew them.

Such views of the Orient, as a backwards, dangerous, and yet deeply romantic place, were passed from agricultural explorer to Californian date grower, reinforcing long established American understandings of the region. Date growers and importers, in turn, marketed their dates via this Oriental romance as well as new scientific understandings. Coachella Valley growers highlighted dirt, disease, and unsanitary conditions in foreign date packing while emphasizing the power of American science, particularly pasteurization, a "white" labor force, and fumigation. Despite the perceived benefits, these practices proved dangerous for workers.

Importantly, the romance surrounding the Greater Middle East in Western imagination provided the Coachella Valley with inspiration to create its own fantasies of the Orient, tying the two regions through the renaming of places and Moorish inspired architecture. As the century wore on, the Arabian theme drew in tourists who sought out the exotic date groves and the themed architecture that grew alongside them. Remaking the landscape into America's Arabia also provided a community identity that spilled into celebrations of the date, particularly the annual Date Festival. This event not only featured architecture influenced by the Orient but also an Arabian Nights inspired musical pageant, camel races, and, notably, sheik and harem girl costumes. The act of playing Arab, in particular, uncovers the importance of the date and its Orientalist connotations for the region's tourism and internal community. These racial masquerades mirror larger American practices of blackface and playing Indian, though few questioned the custom.

While much of the study ends in 1965, this research also brings up the shifting American pop cultural understanding of the Greater Middle East, which changed drastically towards the end of the century, as new geopolitical realities filtered through film and television. A review of the recent controversy over the Coachella Valley High School's Arab mascot provides crucial questions about what it means to play Arab in the twenty-first century.

In April 1917 the United States officially entered a war that it had hoped to avoid. To sway popular sentiment, the U.S. government launched a propaganda campaign that rivaled their armed mobilization. Though many came to support the war effort, isolationist tendencies and the ready embrace of social distractions that followed the Armistice suggest a more complicated reaction to the United States’ participation in the First World War. As we approach the centennial anniversary of the nation’s entrance into WWI, it is essential that we reexamine that war’s legacy and question our understanding of the United States’ domestic responses. My dissertation, “Playing West: Performances of War and Empire in Pacific Northwest Pageantry,” does this through a close examination of the historical pageants staged in the Pacific Northwest during the five-year period immediately following the war. These large-scale civic spectacles found widespread appeal during the Progressive Era in the eastern United States and Midwest only to wane in popularity in the war’s aftermath, yet in Oregon and Washington, pageantry enjoyed its greatest successes between 1919 and 1924 with shows that overwhelmingly employed themes of violence, sacrifice, and empire building, and that occasionally recreated the war itself.

Between 1893 and 1919, when he was fired for assaulting a zoo visitor, “Cy” DeVry appeared in over 300 articles; Chicagoans watched and read as he wrestled bears, cavorted with opera stars, and force-fed snakes. These articles often resulted from deliberate efforts to promote the zoo: in addition to staging public spectacles, DeVry actively engaged with the press by offering comments, responding to letters, and writing articles. While these efforts often featured zoo animals, they centered around DeVry’s presentation of himself as a manly professional. Over the course of his career, he performed an idealized version of white, American masculinity as he struggled to dominate, discipline, and care for the zoo’s animals. Ultimately, these performances were successful: DeVry effectively publicized the Lincoln Park Zoo by making himself into its star attraction. Visitors flocked to the zoo not only to encounter unfamiliar animals, but also to see “Cy” perform that encounter as a masculine struggle for paternal dominance.

At the turn of the twentieth century, white settlers arriving in Inland Southern California’s rich valleys attempted to construct a white utopic rural space. However, this vision ignored the realities of a multiracial space and the racialized capitalism of the growing citrus industry. This dissertation seeks to untangle how a racialized rurality was constructed, reconstructed, and contested in the San Bernardino Valley, and particularly, in the small townsite of Bryn Mawr, California. In my analysis of rurality, I trace the shifting racialized landscape in Bryn Mawr with particular attention to Mexican space and the Mexican community. As I trace the region’s shifts between the 1880s and 1950s, I tease out multiple strands and acts of Mexican American placemaking occurring in Bryn Mawr, California including community building, homeownership, labor activism, print culture, and school desegregation.

This dissertation is engaged partially in the reconstruction of historical memory in a region which has continually erased and misrepresented the histories of Mexican American families. My project is not only comprised of intensive archival research but represents my robust and ongoing public history projects including oral history creation, local education initiatives, free public history fairs, as well as the creation of community based, post-custodial digital archives, which combat the systematic erasure found in established archives. Together, robust archival research and innovative public history methodologies allow for the reconstruction of a particular racialized landscape and, most importantly, allow us to “Remember Bryn Mawr.”

This dissertation examines the significance of the National Historic Landmark Mission Inn Hotel in Riverside, California, through the lens of public history. This interdisciplinary work considers how history has been made and remade at the Mission Inn throughout the long twentieth century, in so doing connecting the hotel's local narrative to the broader national and transnational processes of consumerism, tourism, imperialism, urban redevelopment, and the contemporary politics of historical interpretation.

First, this work firmly places the Mission Inn within the historiography of Southern California, positing that although the site is largely missing from the major works on the region's history, through its architecture, advertising campaigns, and historical pageants staged at the hotel, the Mission Inn was as an integral site in the growth of the Southern California tourist industry that was based on a mythic mission past.

This dissertation then shifts to explore the Inn's object collections and their central role in the hotel's enterprise within the context of the nation's burgeoning consumer culture. The hotel's elaborate exhibitions are linked to the larger development of the nation's public and proprietary museums that were used for education, entertainment, and, in cases like the Mission Inn, as moneymaking enterprises. The avenues allowing hotel proprietor Frank Miller to acquire his international collections during the early twentieth century are also inextricably bound to U.S. imperial designs, which gave him access to places around the world to collect exotic treasures for his hotel.

From midcentury onward the Mission Inn's popularity waned and it slowly decayed from years of delayed maintenance. Purchased by the City of Riverside in 1976, the Inn was a contentious hallmark of the city's redevelopment initiative, mirroring the larger state and national push to renew downtown urban cores.

Today, the Mission Inn is a study in the perils of public/private partnerships in the public history field. While the hotel is run as a for-profit hotel a non-profit is responsible for educational programming and stewarding the Inn's historic collections. The fragile relationship is continually tested based on the organizations' fundamentally different goals. Interpreting the hotel's history is always a political quagmire.

The nineteenth century brought significant cultural changes for the United States. In addition to changing religious ideals, shifting gender roles, and educational reform, perspectives on disability began to transform. Particularly within Presbyterian circles, Deafness was a target for rehabilitation. The founding of the Connecticut Asylum for the Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons provided a new opportunity for wealthy, white d/Deaf people to learn the then newly created American Sign Language. Some of the first students enrolled included Sophia Fowler and Eliza Boardman, two women who received formal education and fulfilled the roles expected of women during their lifetime by becoming wives and mothers. Previously, disabled women were prevented from doing any of this. This project relies on methodologies associated with biography, critical disability studies, and gender history to use the lived and documented experiences of Fowler and Boardman as case studies for how cultural and social shifts related to disability and gender allowed space for d/Deaf women to challenge gender roles and perspectives on disability in the nineteenth century US.

The history of temperance and prohibition has long been constructed as either a rural backlash against modernity or a defining feature of middle-class culture. Early scholarship inaccurately denounced prohibition as a consequence of rural discontent in an increasingly urban immigrant America. More recent scholarship has relocated temperance in middle-class culture and politics, often to the neglect of the agrarian sector. Using an exploration of the production of space, this dissertation reexamines the place of temperance in the transition of the North American colonies from a largely subsistence-oriented society to a modern market-centric nation-state. I contend that as a middle-class movement, temperance emerged out of the enclosure and improvement movements and trace the movement’s history as a cultural arm of enclosure through to the passage of national prohibition. As shown herein, dry crusaders of the early republic were antagonistic to the subsistence farmers who were viewed as a threat to the national project. This antagonism was extended to new stock immigrant farmers who arrived in waves through much of the 1800s. In an attempt to redefine American farms and fields, across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, temperance advocates pushed farm commercialization and the transformation of farming and food systems to meet the needs of an industrial society. But because temperance ideology failed to address the very real economic concerns of farmers in their struggles with the transition to commercial production, agrarian America remained ambivalent to temperance up to and following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.

This dissertation considers the ways in which tourism associated with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 have represented the intersections of gender, race, and class since the nineteenth century. Representations of classed masculinity, femininity, whiteness, Blackness, and indigeneity engage the perceived threats to, and the threats of, white patriarchy in the face of shifting racial and gender roles. Interpretations of the trials represented in travel guides, museums, walking tours, and memorabilia reflect the assumptions that predominantly white, middle-class Americans have had towards problems of authority and identity at particular moments in history. The Salem witch trials disrupt ideas of New England exceptionalism and undermined the mainstream public history work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that asserted white patriarchal dominance and facilitated middle class bourgeois norms and values. Therefore, tracing the evolution of discourses in witchcraft tourism afford a useful opportunity for considering the fractures, ambivalences, and reconciliations present in New Englanders’ constructions of a usable past and identity. Tourist narratives have largely served to legitimize white patriarchal authority in the present, evolving in response to shifting attitudes towards identity and authority and perceived moments of social upheaval such as the Civil Rights Movement. In seeking to valorize bourgeois masculinity, however, travel boosters have often marginalized their treatment of the accused women and interpreted colonial femininity in ways that validated patriarchal gender values or constructed issues of colonialism and misogyny as problems of the past. These narratives also scapegoated an enslaved indigenous woman, Tituba, for instigating the witch trials with superstitions from the Caribbean, thereby shifting blame for the witchcraft panic from Anglo-American culture and intellectualism to an unruly woman of color extrinsic to New England.

This project focus on the case study of the segregated “Mexican School” in Bryn Mawr, California. The author situates this case study within the larger sociopolitical landscape of citriculture, San Bernardino County school segregation policy, and Mexican American activism in the Inland Empire. In addition, this study pays tribute to the multiple ways in which community archiving and grassroots preservation are a crucial form of resistance articulated through the continued assertion of hidden histories.